Last week, we took a look at the value of microblogging. This week, let's take it one step further and talk about managing your presence on microblogs and other social media sites with Ping.fm and 8hands.

Ping.fm

Ping.fm is a simple service that makes updating your social networks a snap. Use AIM, GTalk, iGoogle, Windows Live Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger, WAP, iPhone/iPod Touch, SMS or E-mail and let Ping.fm relay your message to a multitude of social networking sites.

Ping.fm allows you to send status, microblog, and blog updates to all of the major sites (e.g. Twitter, Jaiku, Wordpress, Facebook, MySpace, LiveJournal, Bebo, Hi5, LinkedIn, etc.) as well as a few of the lesser known sites all at once. (What the heck's a koornk?) An invaluble tool in being active in a dozen communities at once, and it even travels well on mobile devices, though you still have to check each site manually for incoming communications, which brings us to ...

8Hands

8hands automatically checks for new events in all of your favourite social networks and notifies you in real time.

In addition to helping you keep on top of updates, 8hands also gives you a gauge of your most frequent contacts in all of your social networks so you can keep track of your most active followers. To date, 8hands works with Facebook, Flickr, MySpace, YouTube, WordPress, Twitter, LiveJournal, Blogger, and Feedburner. Support for Friendster, Xanga, Last.fm and Bebo is in the works. Sadly, unlike Ping.fm, you're tethered to your computer if you want to use 8hands.

In Closing

What do you guys think? Do you know any other alternatives that combine Ping.fm and 8Hands together?

Edit: I'm struggling with getting 8hands to recognize my networks. Everything seems to be rejecting the credentials, except Twitter. Hopefully it works better for you folks!